September 13, 2011

I have not read the studies, but they are available for downloading at the Center's website here, where the findings are summarized:

The odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites was 576-to-1 and 504-to-1, respectively, using the SAT and class rank while controlling for other factors. Thus, the median composite SAT score for black admittees was 150 points lower than for whites and Asians, and the Latino median SAT score was 100 points lower. Using the ACT, the odds ratios climbed to 1330-to-1 and 1494-to-1, respectively, for African Americans and Hispanics over whites.

For law school admissions, the racial discrimination found was also severe, with the weight given to ethnicity much greater than given to, for example, Wisconsin residency. Thus, an out-of-state black applicant with grades and LSAT scores at the median for that group would have had a 7 out 10 chance of admission and an out-of-state Hispanic a 1 out of 3 chance—but an in-state Asian with those grades and scores had a 1 out of 6 chance and an in-state white only a 1 out of 10 chance.

CEO chairman Linda Chavez noted: “This is the most severe undergraduate admissions discrimination that CEO has ever found in the dozens of studies it has published over the last 15 years.” Chavez also noted: “The studies show that literally hundreds of students applying as undergrads or to the law school are rejected in favor of students with lower test scores and grades, and the reason is that they have the wrong skin color or their parents came from the wrong countries.”

Of course, the real story here is not the the "severe discrimination" occurs at any selective college, but that this group was able to document it so well using test scores, class rank, and the tools of statistical analysis.

The part that saddens me is that, as I understand the research, kids do better in colleges that are suited to their academic achievements.

I say that as a parent of an overachiever, an underachiever, and a can't-tell-yet. I'd not want my wonderful slouch-through-school child at UNC-CH - he'd be miserable. And the number show he'd be much more likely to drop out.

So they may be doing themselves a favor, but it's not helping the kids.

Maybe some bright person will canvass the members of the National Black Law Students Association (www.nblsa.org) to determine which law schools black students prefer, and why.

Linda Chavez is wasting everybody's time and money. We are entering a post-Affirmative Action era. If UW-Madison's law school wants to soil its reputation with arbitrary and stupid admissions policies, she should let it.

The negative effects of mismatching minority students to colleges are well documented. The student who should go to a community college is recruited to a university branch campus. The student who fits at a branch campus is recruited to a flagship campus. The student who fits at the flagship school is recruited to the Ivy League. The result of this is the minority student getting lower grades and/or dropping out when they would have been successful if they had been correctly placed.

The schools use the students to pad their numbers and harm many of the students for life.

If you are of Portuguese descent does that count as Hispanic?Howabout if you get your Portuguese blood quanta by way of Brazil or the Azores?Do blonde haired, blue-eyed Mexicans with anglo-sounding last names get to call themselves Hispanic?

Why would you openly expose the pedophilia, I mean racism, of the priests, I mean admissions folks, unless you wanted the church, I mean university, to fall?

Why do you want the church, I mean university, to fall when its whole mission is to do good?

Your revealing these things about priests abusing children, I mean whites and Asians being discriminated against: this isn't about honesty or truth - you just hate the church, I mean university, and all the good it stand for, and want to see it fall.

In San Francisco, there was a big flap over Rosendin Electric getting minority contracts, because los hermanos Rosendin are Spanish. Mexican groups protested, but in the mean time Rosendin became one of the biggest electrical contractors in the area. On the other hand, this sort of thing is rare.

The more I think about it, the more I think that white kids marking down "I am black" on their applications is very Alinsky. Wasn't there something in Alinsky about "hold the opposition to their own principles"? How about forcing the opposition to start implementing racial purity tests and other Nazi-style racial classifications?

Why should white students just politely refrain from challenging this racial discrimination? For them to meekly put "I am white" on their applications is like blacks voluntarily sitting in the back of the bus.

Put the screws to the leftist admissions committees...make them say "you aren't black enough". Then ask "by what criteria? How are you judging my blackness?" etc

Are these tests the only thing we should be looking at for admissions? Are they even an indicator of outcomes? My work in post-graduate admissions says no. It's only one piece of who each of these applicants are. I would assume there are minimums to these numbers. Other factors are also considered. As it should. IMHO.

I don't know whay these people, those that don't understand what equality really is, refuse to understand that whites and Asians must be passed over to atone for past wrongs. Plus, DIVERSIT. We must have DIVERSITY.

As you know, Asians, who come from a very different culture than American whites and Afro-Americans really don't contribute to DIVERSITY. One is enough.

Whites have had the position of privilege and been first in line for centuries. Time to feel guilty and turn the tables. So, work your butts off little white/Asian high school kids, make good grades and high ACT/SAT scores, but don't be cruel and selfish and expect everyone to be judged by the same standards as you. The same goes for you undergrads wanting to go to law school.

So how do you dumb down a society? Multiply this times X number of universities times X number of years. Add in corporate hiring practices mirroring this, and you have a society that is slowing down from within. Our abilities and our thinking power have all been tossed aside as insignificant to the larger goal of equality, or some version of what that should look like.

Look around. What started as a slow decline in this country has sped up over the past decade. The decline is apparent in all facets of life as the 'graduates' of these policies have hit the streets.

This is not a statement on race. This is a statement on societal standards. This is a statement on the goal of educators, which used to be...to educate. Now it has a different higher purpose: even out.

Also love all the climate skeptics who disregard decades worth of data, but immediately will take every line in this report that literally just came out, as gospel.

The problem is that when you look at millenia's worth of data, there is no significant global warming. Part of the problem is only looking at decades'-worth. The other part is that leftists want to implement "climate change" reparations and other big government programs as a back door method of foisting more socialism on the West.

If man-caused, significant global warming somehow turns out to really be a danger, then how unfortunate it was for us all that it was latched on to by the Left as an excuse to choke off industry, send our earnings off to Africa, etc.

Just knowing that the standards for Blacks and Hispanics are set so much lower, makes you wonder about why you would want to HIRE anyone who attended the UW law school who fit into those minority categories.

The chances are that they would also be substandard lawyers since the pool was selected to be substandard.

I wouldn't want to hire one of them.

That may not be fair to those minority students who are capable and qualified. However, the perception is that Affirmative Action students are not up to par and the statistics in this study confirm that.

So how do you dumb down a society? Multiply this times X number of universities times X number of years.

Add in the pointless, if not actually damaging, Diversity department that is a sub-department of every HR department.

You'll find somewhere between 2 and 5 people employed in this sub-department in every institution in the U.S. Their job: spying, encouraging grievance and forcing people to suffer through worthless "courses."

Just to help you out in your wondering garage, skeptics don't ignore any scientific data, they simply recognize its incomplete nature and refuse to bridge the gaps with models that are pure fantasy.

What's really remarkable is the number of alarmists who uncritically accept the most tenuous evidence for GW and yet are reluctant to grant the validity of simple number crunching whose results do not support their agenda.

Also love all the climate skeptics who disregard decades worth of data, but immediately will take every line in this report that literally just came out, as gospel.

Another difference is that I've had personal experience of being passed over for a federal government job due to race and gender. I was told quite bluntly by the HR person, who happened to know my father which I'm sure was the reason for such candor, that I didn't have a chance at getting a job with them because I was white and male.

I love how all the liberals/progressives have no problem with bigotry and discrimination as long as its against whites and males (and conservatives). Indeed, they argue vociferously that it is the right thing to do while calling for equality and fairness in the same breath.

I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not personally felt stigmatized either within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review.http://www.hlrecord.org/2.4475/record-retrospective-obama-on-affirmative-action-1.577511?pagereq=1

For a system subsidized by state tax dollars, it is a CRIME that in state residency in not the #1 qualification. You live in Wisconsin your whole life, pay taxes, and your kid can’t get into UW because some smarmy admissions officer decides you being from Wisconsin, and white, doesn’t add to the cultural value of UW. Why should any tax payer be forced to subsidize such a school?

This report is a case of statistical incompetence. They used an inappropriate statistical model to produce the comically large adjusted odds ratios. Logistic regression,\ and odds ratios in general are appropriate for modeling binary events when the events are not common (i.e. <10%). In this instance, however, the "outcome", admissions rates, is very common (59-90%). Use of a logistic model with a common outcome will produce grossly inflated odds ratios. The analysis should either have presented stratified odds ratios or used a log-binomial model.

In 2008, 300 black students were admitted out of 421 applicants, or 71%. In comparison 9,875 white students were admitted out of 16,663 applicants, or 59%. Black students made up 2.6% of admitted students versus 2.2% of applicants. In the extreme and absurd case that none of the 300 admitted black students "should" have been admitted on merit criteria, the total number of white students admitted could have been 12,875 or 77%. Under no scenario could black students reasonably have been 576 times more likely to be admitted than a white student.

Hey Triangle Man...good, the let UW admit all out-of-state New Yorkers and relieve the Wis population of supporting such a crap institution. I would bet after shedding light on these practices, the population of Wis will become disgusted with the University Culture in their state, just like they did when the Union culture was exposed.

Also love all the climate skeptics who disregard decades worth of data, but immediately will take every line in this report that literally just came out, as gospel.

If it turns out the data was massaged as much as the climate scientists massaged theirs I'm pretty sure Gore's disciples will be quick to label it "fabricated". I guess we'll just have to wait for the email dump, eh?

who may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year

His Law Review had an AA policy? Wow, they must think very little of the evaluating capacity of their law review students at Harvard. At my school, everyone who wanted to be on law review was assigned a number. No one knew anything about the applicant but the work that he/she turned in until the decisions were made.

Thus, an out-of-state black applicant with grades and LSAT scores at the median for that group would have had a 7 out 10 chance of admission and an out-of-state Hispanic a 1 out of 3 chance—but an in-state Asian with those grades and scores had a 1 out of 6 chance and an in-state white only a 1 out of 10 chance.

If I was a Wisonsin taxpayer and parent, I believe I would be seriously pissed.

And everyone wonders why businesses are so hesitant to hire today. It takes at least a decade of REAL WORLD experience to knock the idiocy injected into the average, brainwashed, recent university grad. Other than the exit from the birth canal, the transition from the collegiate ‘dream world’ into the real-world is the most difficult. I knew when I was in college and grad school that I was basically attending life’s fantasy camp, and had a hard time taking seriously, those professors and students that took the culture as some source of productive output. It was a joke. I never watched so much daytime TV in my life. Today I’ll sell anyone my Master’s degree for $50. The only reason I stayed in Grad school was to drink more, do bongs, live with my girlfriend, and avoid getting a job. I was 23, lazy, wasted, and stupid. But, I paid for it myself. I’ll say it again. Tax payers should not be forced to subsidize a state school system where their children are not given a fair chance to attend. You should be allowed to opt out and say, ‘we won’t even apply’.

You made a false accusation and called *me* a liar on top of it. And you won't apologize. You're a piece of human shit, shouting thomas. Don't bother ever interacting with me here again. I will not reply. Ever.

You made a false accusation and called *me* a liar on top of it. And you won't apologize. You're a piece of human shit, shouting thomas. Don't bother ever interacting with me here again. I will not reply. Ever.

Hilarious!

You still haven't told us who in the Democratic Party pays you to troll this site.

I think the statistics look suspect as well (1494-to-1?). But this result:

"Thus, an out-of-state black applicant with grades and LSAT scores at the median for that group would have had a 7 out 10 chance of admission and an out-of-state Hispanic a 1 out of 3 chance—but an in-state Asian with those grades and scores had a 1 out of 6 chance and an in-state white only a 1 out of 10 chance."

Today's college experience is nothing more than an additional extension to an already lengthy human incubation period. But, I guess maybe it is best to corral all the idiocy of 18 to 24 year olds in one place. Only in that little word can they pretend they actually run anything. “Student Leaders” – give me a break. Did anyone here give a shit about who was president of student government when they were in college? Oh and Triangle man. Although the Land of the Cheese is near and dear to my heart, I think about 700,000 of them voted for that cat-woman Kloppenburg, which makes me question the overall intelligence of many in the state.

The less tax payer support the school gets the more they have to go to out-of-state students for tuition dollars.

The problem is then, you get things like what happened at the other (and inferior) UW, in Washington, where stellar kids with 4.0s were denied entry so the UDub could grab out-of-state tuition from someone almost as good from Cali.

It's in the best interest of the University to have good relations with state Taxpayers (I think UWisc does). Denying them entry does not foster good relations.

Also, a tremendous number of Asians in the UC system were/are foreign students.

You went to "the UC system," did you? Like, all of it?

I don't know if this shows up in the studies. Quite often the math/science TA/GSI and the students would just give up trying to speak English and start yammering in Chinese which wasn't very helpful to the American kids - including the Asian-American kids. And that was then: I can only imagine what it's like now.

UC/Berkeley engineering grad (white, unversed in Chinese) from 1988: This was not the case when I was at UCB, although my classes were overwhelmingly Asian and male.

I was quite pissed off that I had worked to get into this school and paid the $$$, yet the lectures were ENORMOUS cattle calls of 1000 students or more. You were supposed to get your actual hands-on learning done by underpaid GSIs - but then they were not intelligible. It definitely made some of us avoid certain classes and even subjects in which we had excelled until an additional language barrier was thrown up.

The lectures were huge at UCB, sure, but the profs were more often than not keen to be buttonholed after lectures with questions. I still have a postcard from the late George Pimentel, who taught one of those odious "cattle-call" courses in chemistry when I was there; he remembered me well enough to add a note to my "here's-your-grade" card to the effect that I should consider changing my major to chemistry.

And let's talk about personal hygiene shall we? It's very dispiriting to go to office hours when you're holding your breath and trying not to openly gag. I believe that not controlling for the foreseeable conflict between the 26-yr-old math guy vs 18-yr-old girl soap and water societal construct can be filed under "gender-discrimination". ;-)

OK, you're saying that your Asian TAs (male) stink? Or that your actual professor has no office hours? Or that s/he is Asian and/or also stinks?

Lady, do realize that you get to say that sort of stuff about Asian guys only because they're white guys for all practical purposes. I would not recommend complaining about the personal hygiene of any Black TAs, nor about Hispanic TAs communicating to Hispanic students in Spanish. Someone might think you were a racist!

(My Dad used to complain about "the Oriental Mafia" whose parents spoke those unintelligible Asian languages round the parents' lounge at Juilliard. He sees nothing at all racist about this, even as to "Mafia.")

You know, considering that of all licensed lawyers in this country 4.8% are black and 3.7% are Hispanic, despite being around 13% of the population each, I don't think affirmative action is that big of a success, and liberals should stop reflexively crying racism when groups attempt to abolish it.

Patrick said... That is a pretty striking difference. 7 out of 10 African Americans vs. 1 in 10 whites? Good lord, I wonder how they will try to explain that. Maybe they are all REALLY good essay writers..

The way they play the game, it's all about the essay. The Admissions folks pick a topic that allows the minorities to bring their race into play. "How have your struggles made you a better person". The minority applicants are coached by guidance types to make the essaye drip with race, class, ethnic and gender discrimination that the applicant had to overcome at the hands of 'The Man"

traditionalguy said... Can you buy an Hispanic name and get into school?

You just have to claim that your mother's maiden name was Ramirez, even though your name is Smith.

timmaguire42 said... Interestingly, the discrimination against Asians was much less than I expected.

Unlike the UC system where the bias is HUGE.

TCB-n-a-Flash said... And everyone wonders why businesses are so hesitant to hire today. It takes at least a decade of REAL WORLD experience to knock the idiocy injected into the average, brainwashed, recent university grad.

Hire a combat Vet. I assure you that regardless of college, take a 1LT back from a year in A-stan and he's fully grounded in reality and deprogrammed.

Of the last 10 offers I have made, 1 was to a black 60ish female non-vet, the other 9 Vets. 3 female, 6 male, 7 back from combat. Attending another Vet job fair this Friday....

To be honest, I'm recruiting mostly for Intel or DoD work so the Job pool is biased that direction.

@Original Mike, I haven't read the reports all the way through, but those crazy-sounding numbers look sound. They're saying that black and Hispanic applicants stand fantastically higher chances of admission than whites, given equal scores. Such differences tend to look unreasonably big when you analyze them this way.

What interests me, and I hope would interest Professor Althouse, is the extent to which such advantages carry through in the classrooms. We know affirmative action helps minority candidates get in. We also know it helps them get hired and promoted after school. How much does some form of affirmative action, perhaps a soft, very difficult to measure form, help them get through school, to bridge the gap from applicant to job?

Here, let me get back on my post-racial soapbox and remind you of my position:

Most of you are sick with it.

And my oh my - as I continually find myself becoming a critic of lawyer types - it's so nice to see that law schools, where these lawyers teach and are made, are revealed to know so much about how the law should be applied. They so smaaaarrrrt!!!

A bunch of Obama-supporting rubes.

John M Auston,

This whole situation reminds me of this truism:

"Reality is so constructed that you can ignore it, if you choose. However, you will NOT be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring it."

Where no one else WANTS TO GO< - like no one wants to go into this multi-culti bullshit (emphasis on the "culti",...) or the true ramifications of feminism, or wanted to go into "settled" global warming, or "alternative" quackery in medicine, and so on:

NewAge - the one subject that has me standing continually open-mouthed, staring at know-it-all boomers pretending to be deaf, dumb, and blind at the long-running charade I know - not believe: KNOW - they're perpetrated against their fellow man.

"Step by step, inch by inch,..."

I don't think even Glenn Reynolds understands the true nature of the singularity that's coming.

The more I think about it, the more I think that white kids marking down "I am black" on their applications is very Alinsky. Wasn't there something in Alinsky about "hold the opposition to their own principles"? How about forcing the opposition to start implementing racial purity tests and other Nazi-style racial classifications?

Already been done. Years ago, teachers in LA began marking themselves down as "minority" to get the bennies, and the school district set up a committee to determine what race the teachers were.

If you think Leftists would have some sense of shame in setting up South African apartheid-type racial classification committees, you would be wrong.

We’re talking about Wisconsin. Their percentages are probably so bad because Wisconsin is so homogenous that they have to work really hard to let in the few minority candidates they do get. (or it could be the N is so small that a handful of football/basketball players are throwing off all the averages).

That is a pretty striking difference. 7 out of 10 African Americans vs. 1 in 10 whites? Good lord, I wonder how they will try to explain that. Maybe they are all REALLY good essay writers..

I've had the inverse of AA happen to me. I applied for a graduate assistantship at St. John's University, and I lost out to someone who was hispanic, and I was later told, under the table, that he was chosen only because he's hispanic.

I'm Jewish. I'm a minority. By the basic design of affirmative action, shouldn't I get the same chance, especially if the department wanted to hire me on the basis of my qualifications?

But Affirmative Action was never designed to give all races equal chances. It was meant to use the same racist markers that the Nazis used in the Nuremberg Laws to denote racial differences. And the result is that some races are to be considered more "important" than others.

The University is trying to have it both ways: keeping the meritocracy fierce and intense for whites and asians but easing admission standards for other races. I presume that supporters of affirmative action would agree that eventually the admissions criteria for minorities would have to rise and equalize -- once the numbers of applicants reflected their respective numbers in population. Do supporters of affirmative action concede at least that much?

Lem, that is the same Linda Chavez. I voted for her when she ran for senate from the formerly great state of Maryland. She was defeated by that hideous fireplug of a bull dyke, Barbara Mikulski, who is still serving, well, still in office. I lament what could have been, but Maryland is now a communist state, so there you go.

I also remember how easy it was for me to attend Pasadena City College. Admission was open to everyone. Back in 1989 costs were low.

Yes, the first day of classes had so many people looking to park their cars, that the cops had afield day giving tickets to all who finally chose spots on side streets. Right then and there, some people drove away and never came back.

However, to get into a class you had to make the cut-off number. And, the professors, to tame this crowd, began giving tests almost immediately. (The most brutal tests were the first ones.) And, people after failing the first one or two, just left! By midterm many had left. People don't stay just to fail tests. Parking was no longer a problem. And, if 25 students remained signed up in class; that was a big class!

This is a lot of noise about nothing. Meanwhile, what's the graduation rates?

This is a lot of noise about nothing. Meanwhile, what's the graduation rates?

Yes, Carol, but the problem here (in a nutshell) is that many many students at the UW (black and white) aren't getting a chance to sit for the tests to be weeded out as you were at PCC._____________wv = "gonal" lol and "nuts"!

A guy smokes pot all day long for 30 days straight and his SAT scores go up 60 points, as well as his sperm count (50%). His doctor after testing him the whole time concludes their is no physical damage.

So, smoke that dope you white boys. It's all you can do to fight the racism inherent in the system.

The university is like a crack dealer. They give some for free. They act like they like you. They gradually take your money. Then when they are done with you, they leave you broke, useless, and brain damaged.

An interesting side note is that out of state applicant's admissions are favored at the Flag Ship University with the football fame.

They pay much higher tuition.

The in state guys and gals are shuttled to the branch schools in the system because the system wants to fill them up and leave room for the most high payers that they can get at UW Madison, the Greatest School.

I think practicing the law involves talent and art. I don't think you can pick yours because he's particularly white.

Recently, I have come to believe Ken Thompson is about the best attorney I've seen.

Before Ken Thompson, I had chosen Roy Black.

It's probably the same with doctors.

You can't set up a color system when you go looking for one. If anything, I'm reminded how well Jews did ... when they introduced themselves to patients. The idea was that if he was Jewish he was going to be more competent than the next fella.

All the Asians I've met, are smart. And, when my son was young, and my mom was 80. I discovered ALL his friends were brought up in homes that respected the elderly.

Talk about a group who are often maligned.

(Oh, and after school, because kids came here to wait for their parents to get off of work, my mom's hot chicken soup, in a bowl full of noodles ... was loved. And, slurped.)

There's no difficulty getting along with people. Unless you decide to make it so.

fafhrd wrote: I'm Jewish. I'm a minority. By the basic design of affirmative action, shouldn't I get the same chance, especially if the department wanted to hire me on the basis of my qualifications?

Actually, it's even worse than that. The admissions practices at highly selective schools were originally put into place as a way of keeping Jewish students from being over-represented at places like Harvard and Yale. You can read more about it here and also in the book The Chosen by Jerome Karabel. Although state schools like Wisconsin have a different history with respect to admissions, as they have become more popular with applicants, they have emulated some of the admissions practices at the most selective institutions.

"Just knowing that the standards for Blacks and Hispanics are set so much lower, makes you wonder about why you would want to HIRE anyone who attended the UW law school who fit into those minority categories."

Ouch.

All I can say is, welcome to your postmodern plantation, courtesy of the 'progressives' and leftists.

An condescending worldview held largely by brilliant (white) democrat minds that say to blacks and hispanics, 'You must get special treatment because we know your qualifications aren't as good as whites or asians.'

Leftists know African Americans and Hispanics are genetically too stupid to compete with Whites and Asians so the only way to have any African Americans or Hispanics in good schools and the professions is to lower the standards for them. BTW if there were an easy, I mean legal, way to determine who was Jewish the Left would discriminate against them too.

One has to ignore centuries worth of data to not be skeptical of AGW. But then it's all a matter of interpretation, is it not?

You famously accept all data in favor of AWG, don't you? You realize, of course that the corollary of your argument means that you must also accept the findings of the CEO imply WU practices discrimination against whites and Asians.

Especially when the same hack tanks that did this report are the same hack tanks that have polluted the body politic with misinformation on everything from climate data to social security. It's what they get paid to do.

UW-Madison Interim Chancellor David Ward: "No one is admitted solely because of race or ethnicity."

Imperial Wizard of the Klan: "No one is lynched solely because of race or ethnicity."

Associated Students of Madison Chair Allie Gardner: "We do not need to defend this, but we do need to defend our university from influence and pressure from outsider organizations that do not have the best interests of our students, our university or our state in mind."

Imperial Wizard of the Klan: "We was doin' just fine until them outside agitators came down here and started stirrin' up trouble."

This is frustrating. This report is "statistically" a disaster. AA is unfair, bad policy, and defended using the most disingenuous means. And then, when there's an opportunity to point out the unfairness, we get this piece of garbage. The problems are numerous: but primarily it is one: there was no cross validation of the parameters of the model which means it is not possible to assess how much of a real admission is not accounted for by the variables being modeled. Thus, very much like less-reputable climate activist-scientists, they understate their uncertainty to make a point. Everything falls out from there: the odds ratios are uninterpretable. Their description of a p-value is also enough to make Fisher turn over in his grave. Finally, the variables that they used in their regression did not include a "whiteness" coefficient, which is not necessary since it will become part of what's called the bias term (labeled as "constant" in the table in appendix 1), but it suggests to me that they were worried how it would look on the page to have a positive number associated with "white", rather than taking the more natural approach which would be to define an indicator variable for all races in the study.

The sad part about this is that the authors didn't need to torture the data to get it to tell a bad story: the story is already bad. This is just going to be so much distraction for the pro-AA camp. Really, really sad.

Fools like garage can pretend that it's not discrimination, but people who suffer under such a regime know better.

Ask any high-performing Asian HS kid if he thinks he'll get judged fairly by college admissions. He knows the truth: He's competing for a small number of slots designated for Asians.

He may have grown up in a ghetto, but his accomplishments, grades, and test scores are meaningless when compared to fellow classmates, even middle class ones, who are deemed "disadvantaged minorities."

He is unfairly burdened by a racial discrimination premised on the notion that his race has been too successful.

"Logistic regression,\ and odds ratios in general are appropriate for modeling binary events when the events are not common (i.e. <10%)."

Pure, unmitigated bullshit. The ravings of an ignoramus. If that's the level of your statistical knowledge everything you say is suspect. Logistical regression is regularly used, for example, to develop predictive models of graduation rates.

UW-Madison Interim Chancellor David Ward: "No one is admitted solely because of race or ethnicity."

Bwahahahahahaha!!

Of course not, the blacks and Hispanics still have to meet the lower, easier, more favorable standards that whites and Asians must significantly surpass.

Just like the KKK didn't bother the good n*****s. Just like when the black man had to be twice as good to get the job.

The same old message to blacks and Hispanics from liberals, "You can't make it on your own. You're too lazy/stupid/uneducated/unmotivated/inferior. You need our help. I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.

Well, or course they are discriminating against the whites and the asians.

For a simple reason: blacks as a group greatly underperform whites and asians as a group in high school and on all standardized tests. There are many causes of this, but none of them are the responsibility of young white and asian men. No one in the race preference establishment gives a damn about them, however.

What does UW count as a minority? One of my nephews is on full scholarship because he is "Mexican" in the sense that one of his great grandfathers was from Mexico. No one the the family speaks Spanish, including the student. No one looks Mexican. The family has a Germanic surname.

Yet he is counted as a minority by UW, gets a free ride, and is required to meet with a counselor once every week to talk about how he's doing.

UW-Madison Interim Chancellor David Ward: "No one is admitted solely because of race or ethnicity."

Race or ethnicity plus reliable politics satisfies the stipulation. I'd wager a conservative of color has similar odds against admission as a white or Asian applicant. Chancellor Ward's Freudian slip is showing.

I worked in the Undergraduate Office for the UW-Madison School of Business in the late 90s. At that time, the advertised GPA required for admission was 3.2 during a student's first two years on campus. There was also an unadvertised GPA requirement for non-white and non-Asian students. That GPA was 2.5.

Even so, the numbers of minority students admitted was far below what they wanted. Unfortunately, many of those students were given a disservice by being admitted. For one, their classmates were much more academically inclined.

Secondly, they were nearly guaranteed to be in the very bottom of their graduating class as they started off with a GPA far below their contemporaries.

And, the ultimate disservice, one student who was admitted struggled mightily in the highly competitive atmosphere and ended up with 160 credits but a GPA below the threshold for graduation. In the end, this student would have had to stay in school for three additional semesters and get a perfect 4.0 GPA to graduate.

Matt wrote:"Even so, the numbers of minority students admitted was far below what they wanted." A few years ago I saw a broadcast of a panel discussion on AA by some university admissions types (including the University of Minnesota in my home state).Throughout the panel discussion they had talked about how important it was to their institutions and society for them to bring the underprivileged into higher education.During the Q&A at the end of the session, a person asked why they insisted on differentiating by race rather than some other measure, like income, family status (divorced or single), whether any parents or siblings had not gone to college, etc.The answer, from a U M administrator, was refreshingly honest. She said that giving preference based on any measure other than race disadvantaged blacks.In other words, if you privileged applicants based on how poor they were, how broken their families were, how poor their schools were, East Asians and whites still outperformed blacks.This may lead some people to conclusions that make them uncomfortable.

A Top Ten public institution being compared to the KKK. Fuck off dick.

Garage, are you really that stupid, or are you merely a contemptible troll? I didn't compare "the institution" to the KKK, I compared the statements of university bureaucrats to things that KKK members would say. And there's much too close a similarity for comfort.

That hit a little too close to home, didn't it? Is your precious little "progressive" worldview so threatened that you lapse into irrational hostility at any criticism of your side's racism?

Or are you deliberately trying to discredit the Left by posing as a shit-for-brains apologist for racist policies? If so, you're succeeding.

Four years ago most of the opinions you posted here were reasonably stated, though often wrong. Now you've become a loathsome specimen of left-wing troll. Why the metamorphosis?

Your true name isn't Gregor Samsa, is it? Examine yourself in the mirror some time, garage -- you've turned into a cockroach.

Pure, unmitigated bullshit. The ravings of an ignoramus. If that's the level of your statistical knowledge everything you say is suspect. Logistical regression is regularly used, for example, to develop predictive models of graduation rates.

Everything I say should be suspect because I am a pseudonymous commenter on a blog, but I am correct about the bias in odds ratios from logistic regression models of non-rare outcomes.

Logistic regression is a useful classification tool even for common events. As a predictive model they showed that black students were more likely to be admitted than white students taking into account other "legitimate" admissions criteria. However, they made hay about the magnitude of the odds ratios, which are biased strongly upwards because they are modeling a common event (admissions to a public university) as the outcome. The same model applied to a highly selective university would have produced valid odds ratios that were unbiased in comparison to the relative probability of being admitted.